The Conservatives, if they win power next year, will have secured a mandate to do nasty but necessary things

AT LAST the phoney war is over. For months it has been clear that Britain's fiscal mess is Augean. Poll after poll has shown that voters know big spending cuts are unavoidable. The government's own budget in April indicated stringency ahead, to those prepared to dig beneath its surface. Yet politicians refused to get real. The Tories talked the austerity talk in such general terms that no seriously uncomfortable prescriptions were discernible. Gordon Brown, even after his desperate cabinet persuaded him to drop the nonsensical insistence that Labour would “invest” whereas the Tories would “cut”, proposed a string of new spending commitments at the Labour Party conference last month. All that changed with George Osborne's speech to the Conservative Party this week.

Outside a few skirmishes, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer has not hitherto had a particularly good war. He has struggled to win over the City of London, where he is known by the dismissive sobriquet “Boy George”. Whereas his equally posh boss, David Cameron, comes across as a Tory of the muddy-wellies variety, Mr Osborne and his Corfu-yacht connections are less endearing to the man on the Clapham omnibus. He has seemed too often a narrow party strategist rather than the man of broad purpose needed to pull Britain out of its gravest economic crisis since the second world war. Most notably, he opposed fiscal stimulus even though it was essential because of the collapse of the economy.

So Mr Osborne had much to prove when he stood up on October 6th to give a taste of what his policy will be like if the Conservatives win the general election due by June. The temptation was to continue to spout generalities rather than specify cuts, for fear of scaring the voters. Instead he spelt out some of the harsh medicine needed to deal with the huge budget deficit, some £175 billion ($280 billion) in the financial year to March, equivalent to 12.4% of GDP. He shirked neither the scale of the problem nor the harsh measures required to solve it. Most public-sector pay would be frozen in 2011, various middle-class breaks would go, rich people's taxes would rise and everyone would have to wait a year longer before getting their state pension (see article).

This programme is far from the full deal. The changes Mr Osborne outlined would save only £7 billion a year, a drop in the deficit ocean. They include the usual boilerplate about wringing efficiencies from the bureaucracy and getting rid of quangos. The truly hard choices—such as, say, closing SureStart centres and shifting much more of the cost of university education to those who benefit from it—have not even been hinted at. Mr Osborne foolishly exempted the National Health Service from cuts and stuck by his pledge to limit inheritance tax to estates above £1m. But as an indication of the Tories' direction of travel, more detailed than anything either main party has produced until now, it is enough.

Mr Osborne's was a brave step. Elections are not often won by telling voters they will have to pay more for less, and work longer into the bargain. Powerful public-sector union leaders condemned the pay freeze almost before the shadow chancellor was off the podium. The Tories will have gambled that, more than anything, voters want straight talking from those who would govern them, and with a stable lead over Labour of ten points or more, they can afford to risk being a little less popular. There is a fair attempt to share the burden. It is not only those dependent on the state for work or welfare who will suffer: tax credits for families with income above £50,000 will go, and the new 50% top income-tax rate on the rich that Labour proposes will stay. These are not big deficit-closing measures but they will help to sell some that are. Similarly, the lowest-paid public-sector workers will see their real wages protected. All the same many poorer Britons will want further proof of Mr Osborne's claim that “we are all in this together.”

So the politics are by no means set. But most of the economics are now on Mr Osborne's side. There remains a risk in terms of timing: cut too early and it could jeopardise the country's fragile economic recovery. (The latest figures show a services sector in reasonable upswing but manufacturing considerably weaker than expected.) But before this week there was also a danger of Britain's debt crisis getting out of hand. Sitting on the fastest-rising public debt relative to GDP of any large developed country, Britain is especially vulnerable to a loss of confidence by bond investors. If the interest on the debt is to be kept manageable, they need to believe that Britain's probable new government is taking deficit reduction seriously. Reactions to the speech in the bond market suggest they now do.

Permission to be rather beastly

In one speech, the dark-clad Mr Osborne has leapt from boy wonder to national pallbearer, and all credit to him. He has done his country a service by putting its most urgent debate on a more realistic footing. The question now is whether he has said enough for the Conservatives to claim credibly, if they win power, that they have a mandate to do not only the nasty things he mentioned but also a great many that he did not.

The answer is almost certainly yes. A bit more detail is likely to emerge. Now that battle is truly engaged, the Labour government will probably spell out its own plans more clearly in the coming pre-budget report (indeed, it may well pinch many of Mr Osborne's schemes). This will spur the Tories into further precisions, and the bleak landscape ahead and the journey through it will become clearer. That will be forbidding but enormously useful.

It would be foolish to expect opposition politicians to produce a fully worked out fiscal programme before they have their feet under the desk. But the Tories have now clearly given warning that they intend to be radical. If they were to come into power next year and, for example, immediately introduce a carbon tax or curb the outlandish generosity of public-sector pensions, then it would be hard for the electorate to complain. That mandate is a useful thing for any government to have—well worth the gamble that Mr Osborne took this week.